What's the difference between official and secular?

Official


Definition:

  • (n.) Of or pertaining to an office or public trust; as, official duties, or routine.
  • (n.) Derived from the proper office or officer, or from the proper authority; made or communicated by virtue of authority; as, an official statement or report.
  • (n.) Approved by authority; sanctioned by the pharmacopoeia; appointed to be used in medicine; as, an official drug or preparation. Cf. Officinal.
  • (n.) Discharging an office or function.
  • (a.) One who holds an office; esp., a subordinate executive officer or attendant.
  • (a.) An ecclesiastical judge appointed by a bishop, chapter, archdeacon, etc., with charge of the spiritual jurisdiction.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) In January 2011, the Nobel peace prize laureate was admitted to a Johannesburg hospital for what officials initially described as tests but what turned out to be an acute respiratory infection .
  • (2) A survey carried out two and three years after the launch of the official campaign also showed a reduction in the prevalence of rickets in children taking low dose supplements equivalent to about 2.5 micrograms (100 IU) vitamin D daily.
  • (3) An official inquiry into the Rotherham abuse scandal blamed failings by Rotherham council and South Yorkshire police.
  • (4) Faisal Abu Shahla, a senior official in Fatah, an organisation responsible for a good deal of repression of its own when it was in power, accuses Hamas of holding 700 political prisoners in Gaza as part of a broad campaign to suppress dissent.
  • (5) A dozen peers hold ministerial positions and Westminster officials are expecting them to keep the paperwork to run the country flowing and the ministerial seats warm while their elected colleagues fight for votes.
  • (6) Greek officials categorically denied the report with many describing it as a "joke".
  • (7) This is not an argument for the status quo: teaching must be given greater priority within HE, but the flipside has to be an understanding on the part of students, ministers, officials, the public and the media that academics (just like politicians) cannot make everyone happy all of the time.
  • (8) Meanwhile, Hunt has been accused of backtracking on a key recommendation in the official report into Mid Staffs.
  • (9) A Palestinian delegation was to hold truce talks on Sunday in Cairo with senior US and Egyptian officials, but Israel has said it sees no point in sending its negotiators to the meeting, citing what it says are Hamas breaches of previous agreed truces.
  • (10) Channel 4 News said on Friday that Manji and the programme’s producer, ITN, had made an official complaint to press regulator Ipso.
  • (11) It can feel as though an official opinion has been issued.
  • (12) In one of Pruitt’s first official acts, for example, he overruled the recommendation of his own agency’s scientists, based on years of meticulous research, to ban a pesticide shown to cause nerve damage, one that poses a clear risk to children, farmworkers and rural drinking water supplies.
  • (13) Sawers's views are echoed by both US and Israeli officials.
  • (14) An official from Cafcass, the children and family court advisory service, tried to persuade the child in several interviews, but eventually the official told the court that further persuasion was inappropriate and essentially abusive.
  • (15) When allegations of systemic doping and cover-ups first emerged in the runup to the 2013 Russian world athletics championships, an IOC spokesman insisted: “Anti-doping measures in Russia have improved significantly over the last five years with an effective, efficient and new laboratory and equipment in Moscow.” London Olympics were sabotaged by Russia’s doping, report says Read more We now know that the head of that lauded Moscow lab, Grigory Rodchenko, admitted to intentionally destroying 1,417 samples in December last year shortly before Wada officials visited.
  • (16) Governmental officials as well as medical scientists in Taiwan have worked hard in recent years to develop and to implement various measures, such as prenatal diagnosis and neonatal screening, to lower the incidence of hereditary diseases and mental retardation in the population.
  • (17) My father wrote to the official who had ruled I could not ride and asked for Championships to be established for girls.
  • (18) Analysis of official registers reveals the 38 companies in the first wave of the initiative – more than two-thirds of which are based overseas – have collectively had 698 face-to-face meetings with ministers under the current government, prompting accusations of an over-cosy relationship between corporations and ministers.
  • (19) But late last month, Amisom pushed them out of Afgoye, a strategic stronghold 30km from Mogadishu, where Amisom officials say the militants used to manufacture explosives used in attacks on the capital.
  • (20) Without a renewables target, Energy Department officials said, it would be possible for a large proportion of this shortfall to be met by gas-fired power generation.

Secular


Definition:

  • (a.) Coming or observed once in an age or a century.
  • (a.) Pertaining to an age, or the progress of ages, or to a long period of time; accomplished in a long progress of time; as, secular inequality; the secular refrigeration of the globe.
  • (a.) Of or pertaining to this present world, or to things not spiritual or holy; relating to temporal as distinguished from eternal interests; not immediately or primarily respecting the soul, but the body; worldly.
  • (a.) Not regular; not bound by monastic vows or rules; not confined to a monastery, or subject to the rules of a religious community; as, a secular priest.
  • (a.) Belonging to the laity; lay; not clerical.
  • (n.) A secular ecclesiastic, or one not bound by monastic rules.
  • (n.) A church official whose functions are confined to the vocal department of the choir.
  • (n.) A layman, as distinguished from a clergyman.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Broad-based secular comprehensives that draw in families across the class, faith and ethnic spectrum, entirely free of private control, could hold a new appeal.
  • (2) In women, the secular increase occurred throughout the distribution of body weights but the change in the upper end was two to three times greater than that in the other parts of the distribution.
  • (3) Secularism is the only way to stop collapse and chaos and to foster bonds of citizenship in our complex democracy.
  • (4) These secular changes may explain why some studies have found that oral contraceptives have a protective effect, while others have been unable to show such an effect.
  • (5) Secular growth changes of Stockholm schoolchildren born in 1933, 1943, 1953 and 1963 were studied through samples of about 2500 children in each year.
  • (6) We still have at our disposal the rational interpretive skills that are the legacy of humanistic education, not as a sentimental piety enjoining us to return to traditional values or the classics but as the active practice of worldly secular rational discourse.
  • (7) Archbishop Eliud Wabukala of Kenya said the “truth [of the Gospel] continues to be called into question in the Anglican communion” and warned against “the global ambitions of a secular culture”.
  • (8) The previous history of PID, especially in the older age groups, reflects the combined effect of secular trends in PID incidence and temporal changes in diagnostic and treatment practices.
  • (9) 'If you meet, you drink …' Thus introduced to intoxicating liquors under auspices both secular and sacred, the offering of alms for oblivion I took to be the custom of the country in which I had been born.
  • (10) Memories of the conflict – in which up to 3 million people may have died – remain very much alive in the country of 160 million, the world's third largest Muslim state, albeit one with a broadly secular political culture.
  • (11) Causes of the marked secular trends in the cancer mortality and incidence are not clear, but the major causes are suspected to be changes in dietary habits, smoking and drinking habits, and other socio-environmental factors such as marital and reproductive factors.
  • (12) The results indicate an end to the positive secular trend for height and weight at about the same time as the previously reported end to a decreasing age of menarch in London girls.
  • (13) Ahead of disputed parliamentary elections, the secular forces that featured so prominently during the first months of the revolution are struggling.
  • (14) This secular trend was due to both "laboratory drift" and increasing use of diuretics.
  • (15) Thus, effects of secular change in age at menarche may not be wholly benign.
  • (16) A broad coalition of Egyptian organisations – some Islamist, some secular – plan to join with British NGOs and trade unions in protest at Sisi’s arrival ; letters denouncing Cameron’s invitation have been issued by political figures and academics , and an early-day motion in parliament condemning the visit has been signed by 51 MPs, including Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
  • (17) Their differences highlight Northern Ireland’s often stark dichotomy between religious-based social conservatism and secular progressive liberalism.
  • (18) It follows that the explanation of the secular trend as being an ecosensitive response of individuals to changing levels of well-being is insufficient.
  • (19) Hitchens responded to counter-examples of secular tyranny in the Soviet Union and China by saying: It is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists.
  • (20) In conclusion it is suggested that medicalization may be conductive to sect development, and that secularization and medicalization are compatible models of social change.